Archive for April, 2012

Very often Battle-reports are messed up due to smartbombs, bombs or Remote ECM. Here you get the possibility to fix that. Enter the url to the eve-kill.net battle summary you want to fix, and you can drag people to the correct ‘side’ of the fight.

Vortex has a post on the eve-o forums (in response to CCP Ytterbium floating the idea of a rig change) that I think is especially interesting:

[…] In all of these situations, rig penalties don’t provide any compelling gameplay choices. There is no way armor-nano can ever be a thing with penalties (as just one of many examples), as all the relevant rigs are at cross odds. No enterprising player can make an unorthodox fit that actually works, because the game just says “nope!”. So you fit the obvious rig with the meaningless penalty, and that’s all that anyone can or will do.

SO HERE IS HOW YOU FIX RIGS:

1)Remove rig penalties. They have completely failed at their purpose (providing tangible tradeoffs in ship performance), and are nothing more than meaningless legacy game-design impacting today’s EVE.

2) Change rig skills to behave like Spaceship Command Skills. In other words, you can have “Armor rigging 4”, but what armor rigging 4 gives you depends on the rig itself.

2.A) Change rigs to scale off their related rigging skill. Trimarks, instead of a flat +15% armor bonus, would become “+3% armor HP per level of Armor Rigging”.

[…]

I think the idea has merit.

It has been a long time since rigging a ship was anything but mandatory on a combat ship. They’re cheap enough that the choice is no longer “do I rig this ship and live with the penalties, or leave it stock?” but “Do I use rig A and live with the penalties, or just use rig B that has no penalty?”

The opportunity cost of all rigs is not the cost or the penalty, but “is this better than just slapping on a trimark or CDFE?” and that doesn’t leave a lot of room for nuance.

IMO, playing with the strengths of each rig and the calibration they use is a better balancing tool than messing with penalties that are easily mitigated.

Hypothetically, given a few common ships, let’s look at the skills required to fly them (I will omit destroyer and battlecruiser-class ships, since they are Subject To Change)

Rifter:

Minmatar Frigate 3

Spaceship Command 1

Rupture:

Minmatar Cruiser 3

Spaceship Command 3

Minmatar Frigate 4

Spaceship Command 1

Maelstrom:

Minmatar Battleship 3

Spaceship Command 4

Minmatar Cruiser 4

Spaceship Command 3

Minmatar Frigate 4

Spaceship Command 1

Now, let us look at the skills required to build those ships:

Rifter:

Industry I

Rupture:

Industry I

Maelstrom:

Industry I

Something is wrong with this picture, both from a game design point of view, and because, well, it’s kinda unfair.

All tech 1 ships require the barest minimum of skills to construct. Yes, Production Efficiency is important, but frankly it pales in comparison to the support skills required to fly any ship in combat.

At present, only tech 2 ships use the Frigate/Cruiser/Battleship construction skills, and even there, contradictions emerge.

Piloting a Muninn

Minmatar Cruiser 5

Spaceship Command 3

Minmatar Frigate 4

Spaceship Command 1

Heavy Assault Ships 1

Assault Ships 4

Spaceship Command 3

Engineering 5

Mechanics 5

Weapon Upgrades 5

Gunnery 2

Spaceship Command 5

Five maxed skills required to pilot.

Building a Muninn

Industry 5

Cruiser Construction 4

Frigate Construction 4

Mechanical Engineering 1

Science 5

Mechanics 5

Minmatar Starship Engineering 1

Science 5

Mechanics 5

Three unique maxed skills required to build, all of which are 1x skills.

Battleship Construction requires Cruiser Construction IV, which requires Frigate Construction IV, the same as the piloting skills, but Capital Ship Construction does not require any of the ship construction skills as prerequisites.

I believe that the skill tree in manufacturing and science already lacks depth, and using a similar structure to the spaceship command skills, while a big nerf to prospective manufacturers, is necessary to keep game consistency.

My suggestion is this:

All <ship class> Construction skills provide a 2% faster manufacturing time per skill level (this is not a required change, but it helps to ease the butthurt the other changes will engender)

In return, all tech 1 ships require a matching level in ship construction as it takes to pilot it.
For instance, a Rupture requires Minmatar Cruiser III to fly, so it should require Cruiser Construction III to make.

Destroyer Construction and Battlecruiser Construction skills are added and slot into the skill tree where you’d expect.

Capital Ship Construction now has an added prerequisite of Battleship Construction IV

All Tech 2 and Tech 3 ships require the relevant construction skill at V to manufacture.

Yes, this is a straight nerf to manufacturing characters. Yes, I also think it’s deserved.

I think it adds depth to the skill tree since you can no longer create an industry alt with two million skill points and have it able to make practically anything. In addition, ramping up the skill requirements adds design space for skills that currently would be too easy to meet any possible set of prerequisites for.

There is a nontrivial amount of money to be made building capital ships. Also, once you get it up and running, it requires very little time investment to keep going. As a highly profitable, low effort, non-grind-type profession which also doesn’t require you to adjust market orders by 0.01 isk, it is literally the best thing in eve.

This guide […] will cover exclusively the building of jump-capable tech 1 capital ships (carriers, dreadnaughts, and rorquals), from original blueprints, in lowsec, for profit. Many of the tools it provides could be useful for building from copies, for building freighters and orcas, or for building in wormholes or nullsec, but these things will not be covered.

For all the big features in an MMO, all the content, the skills, the special events, it is often the little things… or the lack of little things… that I remember most about a game. Usually when I am playing another game that does not have this little feature or that, and those missing features become like grains of sand in my underwear… not a real problem, but an annoyance that just won’t go away.

So with that in mind, I made a list of little features… mostly little… that I want MMOs to start freely copying from each other.

The 20 Hour Day

Who should be the template: WoW

Who really needs it: EVE Online

A couple of years back Blizzard had a great idea. They put 1 day lockouts on a 20 hour timer. Anything that was “once per day” got a four hour break. And…

Sponk has a post on Failheap in a thread discussing the logistics of transport and trade in Eve (amongst other things) that highlights the main issues surrounding the mythical ‘industrial expansion’ that always seems to be on the horizon but never gets done.

What CCP has consistently failed to do is to articulate a plan for the economic structure of nullsec.

A lot of people who complain about this situation would prefer nullsec to be the Stargate:Atlantis of Eve instead.

Imports: Basically everything, but in punishingly small volumes
Manufactures for local use: as much as it can
Exports: high-tech relics in punishingly small volumes

To change to this model, jump freighters have to go (or have their cargohold cut by 95%) plus jump spoolups plus nerfing mineral compression for low-ends plus make mining low-ends in null easy-mode plus a whole raft of other changes, or else you’ll find that a single nullsec fight depletes the entire region of manufacturing capability for days, just to replace the ammo, let alone the ships.

This is a major issue for a nullsec industry shakeup that hasn’t been addressed so far by CCP.

What should nullsec import, and what should nullsec export? More on this once I’ve had a think about it.